At some point in early adulthood, you will choose an athlete or two whom you will view as contemporaries.

He or she is about the same age as you are, coming into the wider world at about the same time you are. While you won’t really have anything in common, you will gauge their progress in life along parallel lines with your own.

On some very superficial level, their successes are your successes. You will feel a small, proprietary interest in how the world is treating them.

Eventually, after a decade or two (if both of you are lucky), they will begin to decline. And that will hurt. As their powers fade, it will uncomfortably mirror the passing of your own youth.

Tiger Woods has always been that sort of athlete for me and, I suspect, a lot of other guys about my age. It doesn’t really have anything to do with golf or his personal failures. I didn’t identify with the person. I identified with the idea of him.

Woods’ allure was designed to appeal to any twenty-something looking for a place to belong. He was the outsider who worked his way inside on his own terms. He was his own creation, which is what everybody hopes to be and seldom becomes.

It feels like he’s been gone for an age, though it’s only been a couple of years. When someone who’s been a ubiquitous cultural touchstone for more than a decade is relegated overnight to tabloid gasping and cynical bits on SportsCentre, that is the equivalent of a vanishing act.

Then on Sunday, with no notice and little expectation, he came back.

My first thought watching Woods at the Chevron World Challenge was that he has suddenly become old. He’s patchily balding. His face is creased and careworn.

The tapered silhouette will fool you. But if you were to judge his age from the neck up, Woods looks a good deal older than his 35 years. Up until his life went sideways, he always looked younger than he was.

Now, he’s aging like a U.S. president.

The inevitable storyline that comes out of his first win in forever is, “Is he back?” Well, no. First, he never really left, except via injury. And his personal benchmark for “back,” based on his career pre-driveway-confrontation, is so high that no golfer could hope to regain it.

Woods can’t be “back” in the way people mean that word until he’s winning two or three majors a year. While Woods was gone, the world caught up to him. Just like it does to all of us — though perhaps not so viciously.

Woods will continue to be a very good professional until, one day, he just isn’t any more. Then he will be a decent professional for a while. And then he will stop playing golf for money and do something else.

This is the side of sports fandom you don’t start appreciating until you enter middle age — that your heroes will inevitably be done in by time, and you along with them.

Watching Woods in the autumn of his sporting life, you appreciate why an entire generation had such a visceral reaction to the sudden decline of someone like Muhammad Ali.

Ali had always been so damnably alive. When he stopped being that — when he became frail almost overnight — that stuttering image projected itself onto millions of men who viewed themselves as his contemporaries. Ali’s crumbling physique reminded them of their own deterioration. He became a living memento mori.

Every athlete on either side of your own life cycle — whether younger or older — exists in a timeless state. Even when he was playing, Joe Montana seemed old to me. Long after he’s retired, LeBron James will always seem young.

But the ones who came up with you are your own portrait tucked up in the attic. When they hit the downslope of life, you’re riding alongside them to the bottom of the hill.

For that reason alone, I want Woods to keep struggling and intermittently succeeding. Whenever he gives up, a small piece of many of us will fade away with him.

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